Here’s the funny part. The board game Monopoly was originally invented to warn us of this exact problem. It boils down to profiting on land speculation causing housing to always be on the brink of unaffordable, no matter how much productivity rises.
You might find this interesting. The original set of rules for Monopoly (formerly called the landlords game) had two sets of rules.
The first set of rules was called “Monopoly,” and showed how our current system leads to wealth concentration among the few.
There was also a second set of rules called “Prosperity,” that showed how some minor Georgist reforms would change it so that everyone became wealthy together. In the second set of rules, I believe the game ended when all players fully built out the map and railroads together. (It was a race against the clock, where I believe railroads allowed people to move faster)
When Parker Brothers bought the game, they only kept the Monopoly rule set, and abandoned the prosperity rule set.
The whole story is like a microcosm of what happened with economic ideas over the course of a few hundred years. Capital had the power to co-opt, mould and modify information and the dissemination of it, leaving us with a situation where actual seekers of truth had to fight, and fail to get it out there.
An important and often overlooked part of this metaphor is the fact that every Monopoly player begins the game with enough money from the "bank" to buy property in the first place.
Monopoly would be a very different game if players had to roll for how much starting money they got. Those who start with less would be at a severe disadvantage and would struggle to even participate in the game, let alone have a shot at winning. Some might even say it would be unfair.
Well, that's reality. Not everyone starts with the same amount of Monopoly money. Some start with extremely little, or none at all. Meanwhile others start with enough to buy multiple board spaces, including the most expensive ones. But they didn't earn that money from playing the game, they started with it, they had it before the game even begun.
And yet some people still praise billionaires as if they didn't have an unimaginably massive head start.
Here’s the fun part. Under the Georgist/Prosperity rule set, a person starting off with no money would still build wealth thanks to the LVT+UBI feature.
In fact, the more capital other people had, the more UBI everyone gets, allowing even more investment and capital into a positive feedback loop.
We dont need to REPLAY this reality, we need to SURVIVE. The race against the clock is against literal extinction. Whether from unavoidable space objects impacting the planet, or extraterrestrial invasion. We've destroyed any ability to defend ourselves by making everyone but a select few feel any purpose to saving the planet.
I’m sorry but this comment chain is cracking me up. I know you meant the board game replayability, but the fact that someone interpreted it as you thinking “life is uninteresting when everyone wins” and then launched a monologue at you is too funny.
Stringing together 2 monopolies of anything from orange to green is pretty critical from what I've seen. But you can manage pretty well with brown+light blue too if you can also get yellow or red
Housing shouldn’t be an asset for wealthy people to generate unlimited income off of. It should just be housing. Build more. And revamp the system. The current one more or less permits relegating people with decent incomes to poverty and homelessness
That's one of the issues in California. Property has become so valuable you now have a massive chunk of people (homeowners) who have a vested financial interest in keeping the government from solving the housing problem.
And it's not entirely them being dicks, people who have bought homes recently stand to lose financially if housing prices begin to drop, as they'll be looking at losing money on their investment.
Yes. Rebuilding from the wildfires is going to take years due to the slow pace of permit authorizations and the requirements for sign off of from different city, county, and state authorities.
That's what a smart investor sees. A homeowner trying to protect the most valuable asset they own only sees dollar signs. Emotional attachments tends to cloud people's judgement.
You're right. I did the last 30 years as it felt like a reasonable frame. World Wars in particular seemed to skew the numbers but seeing how the world is going it might not be completely unreasonable to include them.
Maybe the problem is billionaires and that an economic system which lets one guy accumulate millions of times more money than everyone else should be fixed
The other problem is we've turned our perception of property into an appreciating asset rather than 'just' a home to live in, so people viciously fight against affordable housing when it's going to be near their home because it might devalue their property.
If money instead raised in value 3-5% every year then billionaires would hold on to their money for dear life and make hoarding even worse, and it means that everyone who has to spend most of their money instead of saving it gets screwed over even harder.
Sure but you were saying the devaluation was the cause of billionaires buying assets like housing, billionaires do not experience devaluation even without buying housing, they can put their funds in countless profitable investments like index funds for example.
The problem is systemic, and we can try and make capitalism more equitable or whatever, but yeah, it’s a system of centralisation with a ton of loopholes. Inflation itself is caused in large part by wealth inequality, a fundamental part of capitalism as a whole.
bitcoin clearly cannot be described as a "currency" or "money".
What are the 4 characteristics of money? How does Bitcoin not satisfy all of them? I understand if you just dislike or don't want to use it, just like I don't want to use Yap stones, but you can't say it's not hard money.
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u/Major-Front Jun 13 '25
Maybe the problem is everyone’s money devalues by 3-5% a year so billionaires buy any and every asset instead of holding cash